Symbiopsychotaxiplasm

I have been part of a movie-making adventure once, and the experience was a mixed one. Not that I was supposed to play any of the key roles: I wasn't the director, or an actor, or a technical person, or even one of those guys who is in charge of a piece of equipment. I was just there, on invitation, an add-on to a crew composed of friends and friends' friends, all of us gathered in McLeodganj in Himachal Pradesh. The movie we were to make was to be about the soul of McLeodGanj. The alleged director, my friend Mohit Parikh, whose brainchild it all was, had no concrete ideas in his mind apart from the vague desire to make a movie about a touristy mountain town with a political angle to it (McLeodganj is close to Dharamshala, the place from where the Dalai Lama runs his Tibetan government-in-exile).

Because there was no script, no definitive plan, no conceived sequences, the adventure turned out to be an exercise in deflation for Mohit and irritation for the rest of us. I've written an essay that touches on that whole experience, in which I try to wean some wisdom from the mistakes we committed.

One of the components of that failed movie-making endeavor was the overnight discussions among the crew. We discussed the movie from what little we knew about it, everyone came up with good and bad ideas, we blamed Mohit, he took it all well and  kept repeating that the problem was not the clarity of his thoughts but the blurriness in his articulation of them, and so on.

Those were highly engaging discussions, and I think we did come face to face with some of the requirements of making good cinema. I remember wishing that someone had filmed those discussions, and I remember wondering if those filmed discussions about a film that had to capture the soul of Mcleodganj could in fact be a legible film in their own right.

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Richard Brody, the film critic at The New Yorker, does a recommendation thing called 'Movie of the Week' at the magazine. On March 11, 2015, he recommended a 1968 movie titled Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.

The title may look scary. It may be neglected. William Greaves, the director, described Symbiotaxiplasm as "those events that transpire in the course of anyone's life that have an impact on the consciousness and the psyche of the average human being, and how that human being also controls or effects changes or has an impact on the environment." He has added the word psycho in it, but I don't believe the addition corresponds to any addition in meaning to the term described. 

At the first level, Greaves is showing us an argument between a married couple. The man is a closet homosexual, something that the woman feels wronged with. In the beginning of the movie, we are shown three different pairs of actors reading the lines of the argument one after the other. Apparently, Greaves has included the actor auditions inside the movie. He does settle on a pair for most of the movie, and he makes them repeat those lines in various ways. 

Yes, it is a movie about the making of movies. But there is more complexity, and more method, to it. The first camera is supposed to shoot the action, the second is supposed to focus on Greaves shooting or directing the action, the third is supposed to capture the surroundings. In the post-edit movie that we are seeing, these three views are often used alternatively, juxtaposed through split screens, or generally played around with. The fiction of the couple's argument dissolves easily, and we, the audience, are primed for an enquiry about the very nature of fiction, of fiction in cinema, or, better still, the mechanics and meaning of cinema. That enquiry is provided by the crew itself, which, as is easy to surmise, grows increasingly discontent with the apparent arbitrariness of the director's vision. The crew conversations are available to us; Greaves has asked them to talk about the movie in his absence and shoot the discussions. Some very perspicacious insights, not just about the movie at hand, but about the role and privilege of a director in the act of movie-making, become available to us through these discussions. In seeing the crew emote about Greaves' process (some are dismissive, some skeptical, some claim to see a genius in Greaves), one also begins to get a sense of how all movie-making must be the result of this intercourse between one man's vision and its collective execution, an intercourse that is doomed to be faulty and thus be the source of many failures, yet also an intercourse that is exclusive to the art form and should therefore be its very source of power.

Wikipedia describes Symbiopsychotaxiplasm as a circular meta-documentary about a documentary, a documentary about a documentary, and a documentary documenting a documentary about a documentary. It is, to me, one of the boldest experiments in cinema ever, one which allows the art form to truly flex its muscles. To be concerned with its meta-ness is to bring it the plane of other such experiments, which would be short-changing Greaves. His idea is grander: to go back to the first principles of the impulse of cinema, to recognize its articulation as impossible, and yet enable an appreciation. Bravo!

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We should have captured the crew discussions in McLeodganj, and spent brains in editing whatever was captured.